Amanda Saunders; Graham Greene's niece assistant
Hyfler/Rosner
Graham Greene's niece assistant
The Independent
14 March 2007
Christopher Hawtree
Shortly before her death at 61 Amanda Saunders had embarked
upon a new career as an artist. Her prize-winning work, on a
bold scale, displayed the transforming gaze, wit and
compassion which had marked out earlier phases in her life
as a photographer - ranging from studies of Henry Moore to
ravaged Ethiopia - and then as the manager of the
often-fraught literary estate of her uncle Graham Greene.
Born in 1945, she was the eldest child of Greene's younger
sister Elisabeth, and Rodney Dennys, an officer in the
Intelligence Corps. Her mother had joined the Secret
Intelligence Service in 1938 and first met Dennys, then also
in the SIS, at the beginning of the Second World War at
Bletchley. They met again in Egypt after Dennys's narrow
escape in Holland from the Gestapo, which had him on an
execution list. Their reunion came from the very stuff of
romantic comedy, for he saved her from prosecution for going
out of bounds to meet another beau aboard a ship on the
Nile.
Rodney Dennys's continuing work in intelligence took the
family abroad, to Egypt again and then to Turkey and to
France, until he changed tack and in 1957 took up heraldry,
becoming an officer at the College of Arms. For Amanda a
life of camping in the mountains and daily swimming in the
Bosphorus became an all-the-more joyful memory beneath the
grey skies of a Sussex boarding school. (The pupils were
once dragooned into a particularly madcap game of
hide-and-seek by another parent who, did they but know it,
was an expert at just that - Kim Philby.) Although very
bright, she was not academic; with undiagnosed dyslexia, her
creative spirit was frustrated, her desire for art school
treated as hot-headed fancy.
She was sent, perforce, to secretarial school but was not
long hemmed in by a typewriter and shorthand pad. A very
emblem of glamorous, swinging London where anything seemed
possible, where a place in a flat off the Gloucester Road
was readily affordable and the famous were not shielded by
minders in night-clubs, she felt inspired to take up
photography and did so while, needs must, modelling for
Worth.
In a family to whom words came naturally - her brother Nick
became a bookdealer, her sister Louise a publisher - Amanda
was the first to break that trend and insist upon a visual
career. Quickly achieving a distinctive style, she had an
ability to put the sitter at ease. That warmth shines
through her photographs - whether in well-known images of
Henry Moore or stills used on the set of Top of the Pops
during several years at the BBC or now classic portraits of
Graham Greene.
She had a slim, "sexy" beauty and she remained remarkably
youthful. The Greene family eyes, slightly forward, have
often been remarked upon; hers, hauntingly grey, were those
of one who lived for others, the very essence of
encouragement. She had a continual sense of wonder, of
delight. If diffident, she also had resilience - not least
in forays to Ethiopia and then Soweto, where, ducking the
authorities, she took photographs that encapsulated
apartheid horrors and were shown at the National Film
Theatre.
Her first marriage was, in Jamaica, to Chris Todd, who had
sold vacuum-cleaners in Canada with such success that, in
England, he became a dealer in high-rolling cars. This
relationship did not work out; she sometimes told the
story - partly against herself and as a sign of those
times - about the evening at Ronnie Scott's when she upended
a wine-bucket, ice and all, over him and walked out with her
friend Shirley Conran.
She then found great happiness with a friend of theirs, the
industrial designer and lecturer Ron Saunders. At their
wedding some of the groom's relations found themselves in
the garden with a man who duly said that he was "Amanda's
uncle"; a little later, when asked what he "did", he said
that he was a writer. Graham Greene's modesty was matched by
his niece's reluctance to trumpet his presence.
During the Eighties she gave much time to bringing up her
daughter, Lucy. At the decade's end, Amanda Saunders thought
again of her own creative work. But both her parents then
suffered strokes. She was assiduous in arranging their care
at home, traversing the country during her mother's 10-year
incapacity.
At her uncle Graham's request she took over from Elisabeth
Dennys the job of his assistant. For many years he had used
a Byzantine but effective system of dictating letters on to
tape and posting them to England for typing and dispatch (a
tape machine was the limit of his technical competence).
With so many titles in so many editions around the world,
his books were an enormous business, and, after his death in
1991, became more so. As secretary to his literary estate,
Amanda Saunders's life was vexed by an unholy trinity of
biographers - not least the authorised one. She would burst
out laughing at the absurdity of it all.
By contrast, she was delighted that Greene's often very
funny letters are to appear this autumn in a volume edited
by Richard Greene (no relation). She was also, from its
beginning in 1998, a strong supporter of the annual Graham
Greene Festival in Berkhamsted which now attracts an
international array of speakers and has staged - at
Berkhamsted School where her grandfather was Headmaster -
such things as his rare play set in a brothel.
At the turn of the century, after her mother's death in
1999, she became immersed in a Fine Art degree. She lived
for this, and was overjoyed at being awarded a prize by
Rugby Art Gallery that included a solo exhibition. She had
found exactly what she wanted to do, she was continually
inspired, and had begun further paintings for this when she
was beset by a disease of the bone marrow, amyloidosis.
Amanda Saunders had a way of getting to the essence of
something, of a situation; this is clear in a haunting
series of paintings of veiled Muslim women, which, at first,
show the sharp lines of something akin to a photograph and,
on one's looking further, yield something else, the sharp
folds of the cloth contrasting with the soft, troubled eyes
within.
Christopher Hawtree
Amanda Claire Dennys, photographer and artist: born London
22 August 1945; married 1971 Chris Todd (marriage
dissolved), 1979 Ron Saunders (one daughter); died London 15
February 2007.